Arts & Entertainment
Steps to Stonewall
Early ‘60s D.C. protests laid groundwork for riots, activists say


Editor’s note: This story is reprinted from the June 5, 2009 edition of the Blade.
The widely held notion that 1969’s Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village were the start of the modern gay rights movement is inaccurate local activists say as they were meeting and picketing years before.
“When people say as you so often hear, that the gay movement started with Stonewall, if I have a chance under the circumstances in which it’s said, I invariably correct them very insistently,” says Frank Kameny, 84, a legendary gay activist widely recognized as one of the great leaders of the homophile movement, as it was then known. “And point out that the movement was just sort of 20 years old already and there was a groundwork.”
Kameny and others who were involved in the early years agree, though, that Stonewall’s influence can’t be overstated, through its significance wasn’t immediately apparent.
Kameny, Lilli Vincenz, Paul Kuntzler, the late Barbara Gittings, the late Jack Nichols and others had been involved in East Coast gay activism for years. An April 1965 picket at the White House by the Kameny-and-Nichols-founded Mattachine Society of Washington was the first of its kind, but involved a small group dressed — at Kameny’s insistence — in shirts and ties for the men and dresses or skirts for the women.
“Things culturally were very, very different then,” Kameny says, describing the scene of an early picket at the Civil Service Commission to protect the inability of gays to get security clearances. “In 1965, men’s shirts were white. Period. There were no other kinds. Dress was very conservative. It changed over the next half decade, changed very significantly … but in terms of those days, if we’re gonna picket to be employed, we have to look employable by their standards.”
A handful of gay groups existed on the East Coast and met regularly as the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Those involved say it was a different world.
“Most gay people at the time were not interested in any kind of civil rights activity,” Vincenz, 71, says. “So we were seen as kind of Don Quixotes chasing windmills. I felt they could at least give us some money, but they didn’t do that either. They were worried about their careers and they thought it was a lost cause. They couldn’t imagine it. So I was seen as a crusader and so we were a small group.”
Kameny says it soon became obvious from ECHO gatherings that D.C.’s Mattachine Society was a trendsetter taking on the Civil Service Commission, the qualification of homosexuality as an illness by the American Psychiatric Association, security clearances, the military gay ban and more.
“All those things we were doing, nobody else was doing to any meaningful extent anywhere,” Kameny says. “We had ECHO meetings in October of each year in ’63, ’64 and ’65 and monthly meetings here in Washington, Philadelphia and New York over that period and the Washington Mattachine was doing things and reporting to everyone else what we were doing. Philadelphia had two women … the New York Mattachine had monthly meetings but they were just meetings, they weren’t accomplishing anything particularly. The things that were being done were being done by us here.”
Kuntzler met Kameny one night at the Chicken Hut, a gay D.C. bar, in late February of ’62 and found a kindred spirit. He remembers the sign he made to carry in the first White House protest.
“Jack (Nichols) saw my poster and wanted it, so I let him carry it,” Kuntzler, 67, says with a chuckle. “He ended up in the front of a photo carrying my sign.”
“That was the first time we had any visibility,” Vincenz, who’ll be honored as a Pride “superhero” with Kameny at this year’s Capital Pride parade, says. “Confidential magazine picked us up and put our pictures everywhere. … We’d never had any visibility before that actually.”
One of ECHO’s signature yearly events was an Independence Day protest each year at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The one held in 1969, though, which turned out to be ECHO’s last, was markedly different. Stonewall had happened less than a week before and changed things forever.
None of the Mattachine activists were involved in the Stonewall riots. Because it was a spontaneous event that quickly gathered steam during a then par-for-the-course police raid on the gay bar, the only people involved were those who happened to be at the Stonewall Inn, a seedy, Mafia-owned dive that attracted drag queens and homeless gay youth, that night. But they heard about it almost instantly.
“We were all in contact through ECHO, so we heard immediately of what had happened,” Vincenz says. “This was a big event that somebody had, so many people fought back against the police.”
Kameny doesn’t remember exactly whom he heard the news from first but says he was “elated.”
In Philadelphia just days later at the ECHO protest, it was clear the formal Mattachine members had some new allies.
“It looked very different,” Vincenz says. “People didn’t care about any dress rules. The Stonewall crowd came over and there we had, we weren’t supposed to have beards and sandals but now we had beards and sandals. I remember two women, black, white, holding a baby and holding hands. It was just new. And there was some of kind of disgruntlement by some of the old guard. This was a new influx of grassroots activists.”
While the Independence Day picket seemed slightly different, it became apparent that things were much different on June 28, 1970 for the first Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March, a one-year commemoration of Stonewall that morphed into the annual Pride parades.
Kameny, who attended, was dumbfounded by the turnout.
“I remember … seeing this vast horde of people and I was absolutely speechless,” he says. “Flowing in like a river into the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. If nothing else, there it was in front of one’s eyes. It would have been impossible in terms of anything movement-wise prior to that. We had clearly overstepped a line. We had transitioned.”
Cliff Witt, a longtime local D.C. gay activist, accompanied Vincenz to the parade as a camera assistant for the film she made called “Gay and Proud.”
“I had heard of Stonewall before, but I don’t remember how I first heard,” he says. “I had many trepidations. You could not be gay in those days. Lilli was out through her Mattachine work. I agreed that I would be like the press, running along side, but not part of it.”
Back home in Washington, huge changes were underway. The Mattachine Society was winding down, eclipsed somewhat by the newly formed Gay Activist Alliance (GAA, which became the Gay & Lesbian Activist Alliance in the ‘80s), a spin-off of a similar New York group.
Stonewall’s significance is almost universally recognized but it’s not the whole story players active then say.
Kuntzler says Stonewall-type events were also brewing in Washington around that time. He recalls a May 1969 night at D.C.’s Plus One, a gay bar on 8th Street, S.E. It didn’t turn violent and wasn’t as dramatic as Stonewall, but the long line of gay men waiting to get in that Thursday night didn’t turn and run when a mammoth flock of police cars arrived.
“They hardly paid any attention (to the cops),” Kuntzler says. “It just didn’t work, so the cops went away. This was a liberation in a way, too. It was indicative of a profound psychological shift that had started.”
“It was like Stonewall started the mainstream gays,” Witt says. “It sort of started the organization of the gay liberation movement as we came to know it. … It became more militant and demanding and in your face. We weren’t polite any longer.”
Kameny puts it succinctly: “I feel we created a mindset without which Stonewall would not have occurred at all.”
Movies
A cat and its comrades ride to adventure in breathtaking ‘Flow’
Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis directs animated fantasy adventure

Sometimes, life changes overnight, and there’s nothing to do but be swept away by it, trying to navigate its currents with nothing to help you but sheer instinct and the will to survive.
Sound familiar? It should; most lives are at some point met with the challenge of facing a new personal reality when the old one unexpectedly ceases to exist. Losing a job, a home, a relationship: any of these experiences require us to adapt, often on the fly; well-laid plans fall by the wayside and the only thing that matters is surviving to meet a new challenge tomorrow.
When such catastrophes are communal, national, or even global, the stability of existence can be erased so completely that adaptation feels nearly impossible; the “hits” just keep on coming, and we’re left reeling in a constant state of panicked uncertainty. That might sound familiar, too.
If so, you likely realize that there’s little comfort to be found in most of the entertainments we seek for distraction, outside of the temporary respite provided by thinking about something else for a while — but there are some entertainments that can work on us in a deeper way, too, and perhaps provide us with something that feels like hope, even when we know there is no chance of returning to the world we once knew.
“Flow” is just such an entertainment.
Directed by Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis from a screenplay co-written with Matīss Kaža, this independently-produced, five-and-a-half-year-in-the-making animated fantasy adventure has become one of the most acclaimed films of 2024; debuting at Cannes in the non-competitive “Un Certain Regard” section, it won raves from international reviewers and went on to claim yearly “best of” honors from numerous critics’ organizations and film award bodies, including the Golden Globes and the National Board of Review. Now nominated not only for the Academy’s Best Animated Feature award but as Best International Feature (only the third animated movie to accomplish that feat) as well, it stands as the odds-on favorite to take home at least one of those Oscars, and possibly even both — and once seen, it’s hard to dissent from that assessment.
Set in an unspecified time and an unknown, richly forested place, it centers its narrative — which begins with breathtaking quickness, almost from the opening frames of the film — on a small-ish charcoal grey cat, who wakes from its slumber to find its home rapidly disappearing under a rising tide of water. Trying to stay ahead of the flood, it finds a lifeline when it discovers an abandoned sailboat, adrift on the waves, and seeks safety on board; but the cat is not the only refugee here, and with an unlikely group of other animals — a dog, a capybara, a lemur, and a secretary bird — sharing the ride, the plucky feline must forge alliances with (and between) each of its shipmates if any of them are to avoid a seemingly apocalyptic fate. Faced with setbacks and challenges at every turn, the crew of unlikely comrades learns to cooperate out of shared necessity — but will it be enough to keep the uncontrollable waters that surround them from becoming their final oblivion?
With no human presence in the movie — though the implication that it once existed, accompanied by the inevitable suspicion that climate change is behind the mysterious flood, is ominously delivered through the monumental ruined structures and broken relics it has seemingly left behind — the story unfolds without a word of dialogue, a narrative chain of events that keeps us ever-focused on the “now.” The non-verbal vocalizations of its characters (each provided by authentic animal sounds rather than human impersonation) help to convey their relationships with clarity, but it’s the visual evocation of their sensory experiences — of being trapped and at the mercy of the elements, of making an unexpected connection with another being, of enjoying a simple pleasure like a soft place to sleep — that fuels this remarkable exploration of physical existence at its most raw and vulnerable. We have no way of knowing what has happened, no way of imagining what is yet to come, but such questions fade quickly into irrelevance as the story carries our attention from the immediacy of one moment into the next.
Accentuating this in-the-moment flow of “Flow”— for if ever a film title could be said to summarize its style, it is surely this one — is its eye-absorbing visual beauty, rendered via the open-sourced software Blender to provide an aesthetic which matches the material. These realistically-drawn animals come vividly to life against a backdrop that captures a deep connection to nature, accented with the surreal intrusions of human influence and a certain appreciation for the colorful beauty of the world around us, even at its most untamed, which hints at an indefinable mysticism; and when the story begins to transcend the expected borders of its meticulously-crafted realism, the animation takes us there so easily that we scarcely notice it has happened.
Yet transcend it does, and in so doing becomes something greater than a humble adventure tale. As the animal companions progress in their journey toward hoped-for safety, the remnants of human existence become more weathered, more ancient, and less recognizable; the natural landscape through which they are carried begins to be transformed, rendered in a more mythic light by the clash of elemental forces swirling around them and the strange encounters with other creatures that occur along their way. Whatever world this may have been, it seems rapidly to be dissolving into a cosmos where the forms of the past are being reconfigured into something new — and the band of travelers, both witness to and participants in this process, cannot help but be reconfigured, too.
We can’t explain that further without spoilers, but we can tell you that it includes the cat’s ability to ignore its solitary instincts and natural mistrust of its comrades in order to form a diverse (yes, we said it) and cooperative team. It also involves learning to let go of things that can no longer help, to be open to new possibilities that might, and perhaps most importantly, to surrender without fear to the “flow” and trust that it will eventually take you where you need to go, as long as you can manage to stay afloat until you get there.
Zilbalodis’s film is an immersive ride, full of visceral and frequently harrowing moments that may produce some anxiety (especially for those who hate seeing animals in peril) and conceptual shifts that may challenge your expectations — but it is a ride well worth taking. More than merely a fantastical “Noah’s Ark” fable reimagined for an environmentally conscious age, it just might offer the timely catharsis many of us need to confront our unknowable future with a renewed sense of possibility.
“Flow” begins streaming on Max on Feb. 14.

SADBrunch will host “Drag Brunch” on Sunday, Feb. 16 at 12 p.m. at Throw Social.
Grab your friends & family, your mimosa, a plate full of food, and join us for Drag Brunch. Five flocking fabulous queens take to the stage to perform in this sassy, extravagant, fantabulous event. Tickets start at $25 and are available on Eventbrite.
Out & About
Being single doesn’t mean you have to be alone this Valentine’s Day!
Casa De LGBT hosts speed dating event

Casa De LGBT will host “Gay, DL, Transgender Speed Dating” on Friday, Feb. 14 at 8:00p.m. at 1406 N. Capitol St. NW.
This will be a night of speed dating, deep connections, and good vibes! Whether you’re gay, lesbian, transgender, or queer, this event is designed to bring people together in a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment Come ready to connect, have fun, and maybe even meet someone special. Tickets cost $30 and can be purchased on Eventbrite.
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